CHOREOGRAPHER CYNTHIA OLIVER RETURNS WITH A BRAND NEW DANCE DUET

We are delighted to welcome back award-winning choreographer Cynthia Oliver, performing BOOM!, an original dance duet co-starring Leslie Cuyjet this Friday and Saturday at 8pm.

Building upon a non-linear sequence of narratives, BOOM! examines a woman’s relationship to herself, her history, her present and her future. The duet stars Cynthia Oliver and Brooklyn-based choreographer/performer Leslie Cuyjet, variously playing individuals, friends, strangers, family, younger/older versions of themselves, negotiating relations that are persistently in flux.

BOOM! began in 2012 as a seventeen-minute piece, curated by Ishmael Houston-Jones as part of his Platform 2012: Parallels series at the Danspace Project in New York, and then again in 2013 at New York Live Arts. New York Live Arts would later commissioner Oliver to extend the piece to evening-length and present it again at the 2014 New York Live Arts.

Like much of Oliver’s work, BOOM! in its entirely concerns itself with the slippages in everyday life—moment in which true selves are revealed and characters betray artifice. This work also continues Oliver’s investigation of black femininity, incorporating aesthetics of Caribbean, African, and American performance as well as drawing influence from her experience growing up in the Virgin Islands. BOOM! is a complex piece—looping, fractured examination of notions of destiny, and what happens when cause and effect do not necessarily align.

This performance will be Cynthia Oliver’s first at the Painted Bride since her 2009 premiere of Rigidigidim De Bamba De: Ruptured Calypso.

BOOM!, comes to Painted Bride’s main stage, November 7th and 8th at 8pm. Following Friday’s performance of BOOM!, attendees will be led in a reflection by choreographer and cultural historian, Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Tickets on sale—$25 in advance, $30 day of show. 30% off for Painted Bride Members. Click here to buy your tickets now!

Cynthia Oliver’s BOOM! is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by the Painted Bride Art Center. BOOM! and is made possible in part by support from the NPN Performance Residency Program. For more information: www.npnweb.org.